This study deals with the many forms of slavery that resiliently continued in the Euro-Mediterranean world after the end of the Western Roman Empire, studying the major post-Roman polities with a comparative lens. The book’s main thesis concerns our understanding of early medieval unfreedom itself; according to the author, different categories of unfreedom could be adopted by landlords to manage and control their labour pool.

Enslaved Leadership in Early Christianity is the first monograph written by Katherine Shaner, Associate Professor of New Testament at the Wake Forest University School of Divinity.

At its core, the book espouses an understanding of the concept of slavery taken from Orlando Patterson and Jennifer Glancy, which not only sees the relationship between master and slave as one of total domination of the latter by the former, but also considers the status and experience of a person of unfree status as fundamentally influenced by their gender.